2024/03/12 by A. Pardo, Idalia García · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical Studies in Latin America #History and Politics in Latin America #Latin American history and culture
paper · doi:10.1163/9789004691940_006
openalex publication_date 2024/03/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
Printed books first arrived in the Americas in the early sixteenth century in the luggage of conquistadors and missionaries. Once the first cities had been founded, a dynamic book market was established, supported by a network of booksellers and merchants that had been operating in Europe since the fifteenth century. The book trade was a profitable business for many families in the New World, but it was also a risky trade, especially due to the imposition of high fines and the threat of expulsion from the trade if a bookman was found guilty of any offence. For the Spanish Crown, the book represented a potential vehicle for heresy and a danger to the Catholic Faith, and therefore the transatlantic market for books was strictly controlled until the second half of the eighteenth century. One part of this control was carried out by the Inquisition, and thanks to its proceedings we have a wealth of historical documents that inform us about the role of books in the Spanish colonial territories. Most of these inquisitorial sources date from the eighteenth century, but there is also important evidence from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thanks to sources such as the ‘memorias’, inventories of book barrels or boxes that travelled through the Spanish Empire and included specific information about the books they contained. In this article, we will use some of these sources to test the Inquisition’s interest in and control over medical and scientific writing and publishing in New Spain and New Granada. A careful examination of the available sources suggests that, in contrast to traditional historiography, the Inquisition did not impede the circulation of medical and scientific books.